Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod. The show about the past rediscovered.

Let's begin with an image. Harry Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, in his pajamas.

Truman is aboard a train on a cross-country whistle-stop tour. It's 1948. It's the

middle of the night. Rolling into Missoula, Montana, Truman hears college students

hollering along the tracks. He puts on a robe and greets them. Suddenly one shouts out,

Mr. President, what do you say about civil rights?

Truman tells the crowd he'll make civil rights part of his re-election campaign.

Headlines the next day read,

Pajama-clad President defend civil rights at midnight.

This was a big deal.

And so was the reporter who broke that story in Negro newspapers around the country.

Alice Dunnigan.

Dunnigan was the only female reporter on the train.

She was also the only black reporter on the train. And though she

worked for a prominent wire service, the Associated Negro Press, her boss told her, women don't go on

trips like this. So Alice Dunnigan was also the only reporter who paid her own way. This was but one of the many challenges Dunnigan faced on her path to becoming an iconic

but mostly forgotten journalist of her time.

She was so poorly paid that she shoveled coal into a furnace to get a break on her rent.

Sometimes she pawned her watch for grocery money,

a humiliating practice, as she wrote in her 1974 autobiography, a black woman's experience,

from schoolhouse to White House. Over and over, Dunnigan was told that she couldn't do this or that because of the color of her skin.

And yet, over and over, she did.

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